Secondly, be sure you’re not posting things that don’t fit with your image or brand. If you have a Twitter account for your Kangaroos in Australia children’s book – you don’t want to be posting content about the latest fashion styles, make-up tips, or politics.

Maintain your genre and niche so that you attract the right audience. Always remember with children’s books, the parents of your genre is your target audience. And you want to post child related content that will interest the parents. Don’t promote content to other authors when you want to sell your book.

When posting anything on social media your goals are to build your audience and sell your books. Simple enough. But, how do you get there?

In all social media you have to post a balanced variety of content to keep your audience engaged and, at the same time, to grow your audience. If you’re posting 20 links a day to your book sales page, you’re not going to do either.

Your audience is people, just like you. Start with this: What do you like seeing on social media?

Images with Text

Everyone loves to see awesome images show up in their feeds, and if it says something that catches their attention and makes them want to share, even better.

With your images, use text that’s relevant to your book/genre/niche.

Within that, there are four basic elements that you should try to balance with your images.

Quotes – everyone loves a good quote

Humor – everyone loves to laugh

Teach – everyone loves to learn something new

Encourage – everyone loves encouragement

An easy to use, and completely free tool, can be found at: https://pablo.buffer.com With Pablo, you can even add your own logo and a link to your website on the image.

Ask a Question

You should try to engage with your audience as much as possible and one of the ways to do this is to ask a question. Sometimes you can do this with a link to an article such as “I think this is _______, what do you think?” or you can do it with text over an image. Just be sure to include a relevant image.

Oftentimes you’ll get some comments, sometimes you won’t, but just keep posting regular questions each week or so to engage with your audience.

Blog Posts

Of course you want to be sharing much of your own written content as well, and one of the ways to do that is to write your own blog posts. Always include an image!

Curated Content

Curating content can be a great way to build up your social media fan base and show that you’re a trusted source for great content. Curated content for social media is links to articles or other blogs that you find, related to your genre and niche. You can find several articles on topics related to your niche and post them alternatively with your own posts.

One way that I use to find content regularly is to set up an email notification from your Google account – using this link: https://www.google.com/alerts You can create one or several kinds of alerts to be emailed to you either daily or weekly. These emails will contain all new articles and content that is posted around the internet for the keywords you choose. It’s a great little tool that can be very helpful when you have difficulties finding content.

Other options could be to subscribe to niche-related blogs that you find have great content and so on, but sometimes if you find too many, your email inbox can get overwhelming.

To start out, I recommend setting up a single weekly email from Google Alerts and increase only if necessary.

Posting on social media is an opportunity for authors to connect with their audience in ways that they’ve never been able to before. This gives you a chance to engage and grow your audience beyond selling just a few books when you make the most of them.

With social media you can easily come up with author marketing ideas to grow your audience while offering a wide variety of content that interests them and makes you become a trusted source whom they’ll want more from.

If you have questions or need help coming up with author marketing ideas of what to post on social media, feel free to ask, I’m more than happy to help!

Get creative, be yourself, build your audience, sell your books, and have a fantastic day!